In this section, we will review documents that examine the significance of enslavement in the development of the American Economy.

Suggested Readings:

• A Slave Auction in South Carolina
• Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa (Excerpt)
• Economic Impact: Did Slavery Stifle the Economy of the American South?
• "Negroes Will Bear Fabulous Prices": The Economics of Wartime Slave Commerce and Visions of the Confederate Future
• Cotton Gin

Excerpt from Debate Over Slavery in America:

“In the wake of the revolution, Americans were generally optimistic that slavery would die of its own accord. By 1808, the year that the slave trade was declared illegal, several northern states had either abolished slavery or had passed laws providing for the gradual emancipation of slaves. In general, Americans assumed that this represented a trend. Although some trafficking in slaves continued, most Americans were confident that slavery was in a state of decline and that little action was needed to hasten that decline...

At the same time, plantation slavery proved increasingly profitable and showed few signs of imminent death. By the late 18th century, the United States was beginning to acquire wealth from an international cotton boom brought about in part by the introduction of the cotton gin. Both South and North benefited economically from the expansion of cotton production. Southern planters grew cotton for commercial production, and Northern industrialists processed the raw material in factories. Thus both regions profited from and became dependent on slave labor.”

Excerpt from Slavery Industry:

“Cotton was the most decisive raw material for the British and U.S. industrial revolution in textiles, the leading industrializing sector in both nations. The industry was spurred by the invention and improvement of such technologies as the flying shuttle (1733), the spinning jenny (1764), the mule (1779), and the power loom (1785). But the labor of enslaved Africans was also crucial. In 1860 enslaved Africans working on only 3 percent of the earth’s land mass in the South produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton, or 66 percent of the world’s total crop, up from 160 million pounds in 1820. This was the sole source for 88.5 percent of British cotton imports in 1860, and even supplied the growing needs of a rapidly expanding cotton textile industry centered in New England after 1790. African and slave-based economies in the Caribbean also provided important markets for British and later American manufactured cloth. Moreover, economist Robert North and others concluded that incomes from marketing slave-produced cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar—products “sold in the markets of the world”— shaped the pattern of regional specialization and the division of labor that helped to consolidate the U.S. national economy before the Civil War (1861-1865).”

Excerpt from Slavery and Childhood:

"Although eighteenth-century planters considered small children a nuisance and of little market value, by the early nineteenth century southeastern planters began to recognize the value of these surplus slaves. As seaboard agriculture declined in productivity, the planters or their sons migrated west, transporting a labor force as young as ten to fourteen years of age. When Congress ended the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, the demand of the cotton frontier for labor accelerated the domestic trade. As southeastern planters sold their slaves to professional traders, enslaved children increasingly became a commodity. Attitudes toward childbearing women also shifted, for a woman who bore a child every two years was as profitable as a prime field hand."

Excerpt from Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1855):

“I was a slave—born a slave—and though the fact was incomprehensible to me, it conveyed to my mind a sense of my entire dependence on the will of somebody I had never seen; and, from some cause or other, I had been made to fear this somebody above all else on earth. Born for another's benefit, as the firstling of the cabin flock I was soon to be selected as a meet offering to the fearful and inexorable demi-god, whose huge image on so many occasions haunted my childhood's imagination. When the time of my departure was decided upon, my grandmother, knowing my fears, and in pity for them, kindly kept me ignorant of the dreaded event about to transpire. Up to the morning (a beautiful summer morning) when we were to start, and, indeed, during the whole journey—a journey which, child as I was, I remember as well as if it were yesterday—she kept the sad fact hidden from me. This reserve was necessary; for, could I have known all, I should have given grandmother some trouble in getting me started. As it was, I was helpless, and she—dear woman!—led me along by the hand, resisting, with the reserve and solemnity of a priestess, all my inquiring looks to the last.”

1. In what way were slave auctions dehumanizing to the enslaved?

2. How was slavery harmful to family relationships of those who were enslaved?

3. How did slavery impact the U.S. economy?

4. In what way did the invention of the cotton gin make it harder for enslaved individuals to gain their freedom?